00:00
The first stretch is talking. It is not a formality and nothing gets picked up during it.
Before anything is picked up the consultation
Every appointment starts with you sitting down fully dressed and hair dry, describing what you want. Bring whatever you have been looking at — a picture on a phone is worth more than a paragraph — and you will get a straight answer about whether your own hair will sit that way, and what going after it would involve.
- What is being done, named out loud: a cut, a cut and a finish, colour, or some combination of those. No surprises halfway through.
- How long it will take, given as a span of minutes rather than one confident number, and whether that span fits the time you have.
- Whether colour is involved, because if it is, a skin test has to happen on an earlier day and the whole thing has to be arranged around that.
If what you have asked for and the time you have available do not agree, we would rather say so now than at the basin.
00:10
Asked, not assumed: how hot you actually want the water.
The water runs the basin
The basin is the part people brace for and the easiest part to get right. You are asked how hot you want it rather than being given somebody else’s preference, and asked again once it is running. If the chair does not sit comfortably under your neck, say so straight away — it moves, and nobody should spend ten minutes being polite about it.
A towel goes on, you come back to the chair, and the hour carries on.
00:25
We stop and show you. Twice is normal; three times is fine.
The cut itself scissors, and checking
The cut is quiet, and it is slow in the middle. Hair is sectioned, length comes off in stages rather than in one decision, and we stop at least twice to lift the mirror and show you where it has got to. That is deliberate: it is far easier to agree that another centimetre should come off than to put one back.
Nothing is cut that was not described at 00:00.
00:45
A skin test comes first, on an earlier day. There is no way round that one.
Colour, if it is happening mixed to the moment
Colour happens only if it was agreed at the start and only if the skin test has already been done on a separate, earlier day. That test is ordinary practice before colour goes anywhere near anybody’s hair, and it cannot be folded into the same visit.
Colour is also where most of the hour goes, so how it actually runs — the mixing, the developing, a full head against roots — is set out on time in the chair.
01:05
If it will not hold for you at home, you will hear that out loud.
The finish, and the honest part the blow-dry
The finish is the first time you see the whole thing together. A blow-dry is part of the hour unless you have asked for it not to be, and while it is happening you get a running commentary on how it is being done: which way the brush is going, where the lift comes from, how long it is really taking.
Then the honest part. Some shapes sit like that on their own and some only look like that because somebody spent twelve minutes on them with both hands and a brush. You will be told which of those you have, in plain words, and what the realistic weekday-morning version looks like. Better to leave knowing that than to find it out on Tuesday.
Nothing is sold to you at the end of it.
01:20
Two columns of minutes, added separately. That is the whole method.
Adding the hour up a span, not a number
Every stretch above carries a low figure and a high figure in minutes, so the honest total is a span rather than a single number. There is a small tool on the next page that adds those two columns up for you.
It is arithmetic and nothing else. Work out your own hour, then write to us and we will confirm it properly.
after
One company, one address, no stories.
The company behind the chair registered facts
Lily Hair Salon Ltd is a newly incorporated English company, and the lines below are the whole of its public footing. There is no history to quote at you and we are not going to invent one: every entry here is a registered fact that can be checked against the company’s public filing at Companies House, and the address at the foot of every page is the one we actually answer.
- Legal name
- LILY HAIR SALON LTD
- Company number
17429171- Incorporated in
- England and Wales
- D-U-N-S
235116615- Registered office
- Lee House, 116-118 Oldham Road, Manchester, England, M4 6AG
- Activity code
- SIC 96020 — hairdressing
- Written to at
- bookings@lilyhairsalon.shop
Everything the company keeps about an appointment, why it keeps it and how to have it deleted is set out on what we keep, and for how long.